It’s been a long time of light:
how it drips through my window like blooms of feathers. There’s this sense
of barrenness I call a home. In February, again, it’s the will
to move on like an incalculable beast. What happens next: even
I am confused by how I think through events as though my bedroom walls
were closing in on me. It’s suffocation or swallow: I do not know
the difference. My legs have grown weak as static.
I remember the afternoons I was called selfish. It’s true: I want to know more
about endings; how to end things. How to attach my voice to the wind.
A game my brother and I played when we were children: sink or swim; avoid
drowning in the lake.
My brother and I have the same mother. It’s not
so strange. The trees are coming into themselves, this winter
nearly over. The strangeness lies somewhere in that I do not know
of seasons, of loving others like I am something to be bled,
of taking my mare out to pasture, to water.
I remember the summer I lived on watermelon seeds. Went
to weddings where I was told I was thin as eggshells.
I want to describe time: narrow, boney, skeletal, a bird.
Loisa Fenichell‘s work has been featured or is forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an MFA candidate at Columbia University and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.